An interesting article in the newsletter of the Calvin Coolidge Memorial Foundation about Judson Welliver. The Coolidge people have expressed some concern about the construction of Welliver as some kind of master speechwriter that made the otherwise uncommunicative Coolidge into an effective presidential communicator.

A Google search of JW yielded this page from PBS that featured viewers asking questions to “experts” around the time of the presidential inauguration in 2001. Someone asked Ray Price (a speechwriter for Richard Nixon) and Ted Sorenson (a speechwriter for JFK) who the first presidential speechwriter was, and they both identify JW, though they say he was the first presidential speechwriter for Calvin Coolidge! Of course, this is only partially true–JW worked first for President Warren Harding as his “literary clerk.”